That's a good example, but I would not want to overstate the need for recursion. Most people look to the standard patterns in https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Enum.htm

That's a good example, but I would not want to overstate the need for recursion. Most people look to the standard patterns in https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Enum.html https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Enum.html unless they are doing some custom control flow. Pattern matching is really helpful, though. It turns complex nested logic into simple truth tables and acts like Eiffel's design by contract, just pattern match on valid inputs, then handle the errors. The same functional patterns repeat at different levels in the stack. For example, in the Phoenix web framework, processing a HTTP request can be considered as pattern matching on the expected inputs (validating them), then a series of transformations (making a db request, taking the result and rendering it into HTML via a template), then returning the result. From a concurrency perspective, the interesting part is that each HTTP request runs in its own separate blocking process (green thread). So when you are doing the programming, you don't need to think about concurrency and async stuff. You just do your thing. This makes it easy to think about and debug.